Tribal massacre victims forced to negotiate with IS
A year after a deadly attack by the Islamic State, tribesmen in Syria's Deir ez-Zor are trying to bring civilians back to their homes.
REYHANLI, Turkey — “It was a blessing that the crops were so high at the time,” Abu Ali Othman from the Shaitat tribe in eastern Syria told Al-Monitor in early July 2015.
There has been very little international coverage of the mass killing of his fellow tribesmen at the hands of the Islamic State (IS) a year ago, when as many as a thousand were slaughtered following an insurrection.
A US Delta Force raid that killed Abu Sayyaf — a senior figure in IS’ illicit oil and gas activities, key financier and Tunisian national — in mid-May 2015 in eastern Syria briefly spotlighted the area near the valuable Al-Omar oilfields, but little attention has been given to the tribes therein.
A number of the Shaitat tribe’s members who managed to escape told Al-Monitor in a series of meetings in the border area and Istanbul that they had tried to facilitate better-targeted airstrikes. By conveying the exact geographical coordinates and other information to the coalition on key IS military sites, they said, they had hoped that greater progress could be made.
